Chatware suite automating cross-chat bridging, moderation, movie nights and more.
I wrote this software in December 2018. I was unemployed at the time, and living in Michigan, and very eager to get myself a better job somewhere else. I figured the best bet was to get really good at writing web applications in Node. Anyway, I did get a job in California in 2019, but it was not writing web applications in Node.
The thing that this software did (and still does) is help a lot of my friends talk to each other online. This makes me feel good. It was originally going to be written to work across several chat protocols (Telegram, Matrix, IRC and Discord) but I never got around to doing that.
I haven't been adding a lot to the code recently, mostly because I am busy with my work (which doesn't involve Node, or any kind of other web application development). The one instance of it I have in production has been running for over a year without much intervention, which I think is pretty impressive for my first big-time coding project. It went unresponsive a couple of times, and all I had to do was restart it. There is still a lot of stuff I want to fix. I might rewrite the entire thing.
Anyway, whatever I write here is going to be printed out and stored in a vault for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, so perhaps I will say something to the people of the future.
Hi! If you are reading this in the future, I will have been dead for a long time. Over the course of my life, as of writing this, I've spent my entire life watching the world change in ways that rendered it almost unrecognizable to me. I expect it to continue changing after I write this, until I die, and past then as well. I have spent a lot of time reading about the past, and am glad that so many people tried their best to make the world a good place for me to live in today. It has changed in ways that made me feel good, and ways that made me feel bad. I am apprehensive about the future, but I hope it brings you happiness and wisdom, and that you live in a world where you are free to exercise control over your own life (whatever that might mean).
I have no way of knowing what world the person reading this will live in. Perhaps you will feel the same way as me about the future. Perhaps you will feel the same way about me as I did reading about the ancient history of my time. Perhaps you are reading this to write an essay for school -- my condolences if you have not figured out a better way to do this yet.
I hoped that I'd be able to spend more time on this, but I procrastinated, and now only have a couple of minutes left. The code in this repository, and indeed, what I am writing now, is a record of something I did in the 21st century, precisely the way I did it -- and like many things in the world in the 21st century, it was flawed and imperfect. Apologies, and I hope you will understand.
Please take care of yourselves.
- x.